Conveyancing Solicitor recommendations please

[hjd]

Can anyone recommend a good conveyancing solicitor in the Woking/Guildford/Byfleet area please?
Have seen an outfit in Guildford called The Partnership who have 75 positive recommendations on solicitor.info but I don't know if that's reliable. Maybe I'm being too suspicious!

[buildersmate]

Do you mean a licensed conveyancer or a solicitor? - they are not the same animal, a solicitor is far more costly to employ.
When I employed an LC for the last job, she was based in Macclesfield, more than 200 miles from where I live.

[hjd]

Either really, as long as they can do the job. If you employ a firm of solicitors then it's not likely to be a qualified solicitor doing all the work.
A friend used a solicitor 200 miles away, almost lost the whole thing when an urgent certificate was needed from the council and an emailed copy was not good enough for proof. They also had a lot of delays due to waiting for stuff in the post.
With a local person things can be done face to face and they also have local knowledge.

[madmaggot]

Beware hjd; we employed a conveyancing company rather than a solicitor to save a few pounds but they ended up costing us £10k!
This was because, although they were handling both our sale and purchase, we were retiring so were not reliant on the sale going through at the same time. The vendors had agreed a reduced price because we were cash purchasers. However the conveyancer totally disregarded this and sent our their standard letter stating that exchange was dependant on our sale. The vendor withdrew and would then only proceed on the asking price.

[buildersmate]

Then the answer, MM, would have been to complain to the LC and then their regulatory body if you got no joy. LCs are required to have professional indemnity policies in place, just the same as solicitors.
Solicitors also foul things up - which is why I am so dead against using them ever again.

HJD
You are right that solicitors invariably use articled clerks to do conveyancing work - supervising but getting involved themselves only if necessary on the more difficult aspects.
Since a typical cost might be £800 and that is the daily rate for a solicitor, you will know that the actual work content involved in a conveyance is 8 hours work - spread over umpteen weeks - depending on how fast people extract their digits.

[madmaggot]

The problem was that the vendors solicitor was prepared to state that the only reason was that they'd decided at that late stage that they were only prepared to accept the original asking price although we'd been told on the telephone that the letter was the reason. We first told them to stick it but later decided that as this was the one that we really wanted after 2 years of searching; and our buyers were ready to sign and prepared to go else where if they lost their time limited mortgage offer; we just had to grin and bear it! The B*ST*RDS!!

[Twenty20]

My view is that any solicitor (I don't know about licensed conveyancers) should be able to handle a house sale/purchase efficiently. It's really not difficult. On that basis I'd go on price, making sure that the quote is inclusive of all fees and costs. Sometimes it can be handy to have one close by so you can pop in to sign documents but it's not essential.